20 June 2010

Vana'diel : Into the New World

Its been a while since I blogged about FFXI, but its been a very eventful few months. The first update of 2010 proved to be packed with lotsa good stuff, like the 2 new avatars and so on. As with every patch, I headed off to get my missions done first, and also the new goodies. Alexander and Odin were mine before the day ended. :)

But all my pics of that are... not accessible. My old laptop died and so I had to do the missions on my PS3. Not the most fun, but its kinda like playing in classic mode.

Anyway, here are the other stuff I managed to get pictures of...

I sought to do some testing on Zantetsuken and managed to come up with some concrete theories on its damage calculation. It seems like a really useful 2hr... on HNMs only.

Then, Nevex invited me to join him with some VNM killing, for which I gladly obliged. Wanted to try them out and I'm kinda happy I managed to get 2 of the 5 Tier 3 guys down before FFXIII took up most of my time..

Later on, I decided to work on my buffer and merits again in preparation of the level cap raise.. so I started getting hooked on Astralburn parties.. ending up clearing my remaining DRG merits and all my PUP merits too. I'm so happy.

And I tried the MMM version of it, which is almost as fun.. but requires much more effort.

Finally, I decided it was time to get off my ass and work on a magian trial weapon, weeks away from the next update. It was kinda tedious but I think its worth it. Theres still like 2 trials left, but I'm waiting until the level cap raise so that it'll be a less arduous task to take on.

As for the next version update..

I'm really looking forward to it. if only because the level cap will finally be raised again.

Raising the level cap is seriously game-changing and will usher in a whole new era in FFXI. It's like a whole new game again, probably.. so much will be different and yet similar.

In a way, I think it was the smartest choice made by Square Enix to save a 'dying game'... but this was better than simple life-support, it practically jumpstarted the community once again. Personally, I've started to play a lot more of FFXI in anticipation of the things to come..

The battle add-ons are interesting too, but I honestly don't think they're the biggest draw in my opinion. It's a cop out in a sense, a fake expansion meant to pacify the more material players who think 'new expansions' are the only lease of life for an MMORPG. Nonetheless I look forward to exciting battles from there and from the older content too, since they'll get progressively easier as the game's cap increases..

Older "legendary" mobs that have lost their power status will now become much easier. And I don't necessarily think its a bad thing, since its about time some of this content gets retired from being end-game. I'd love to see casuals take over and make it a fun event. I'd love to finally kill Vrtra for the sake of it. And so on.

So really, Vana'diel is approaching a new era. It's into the new world of FFXI for me. I cannot wait for Monday's update to roll by.